I have been reading a bit lately.   Taking my free time to read a bit here and there.   Every night before I go to bed I read on my iPhone until I just about pass out.   Last night I literally passed out. I woke up and I was holding my phone and it hadn’t self locked yet.   I actually read a few more pages and then went to sleep properly.

In the last few months I have read more than I have in the last 3 -4 years combined.   I’m not up to my reading prime days, but it’s pretty much in full force.   Before I would read if I took a bath or just had a few minutes to kill.   It would take me weeks to finish any books, if I finished them at all.

Since December I’m on my third Oz book with Lex.  Most nights we do a chapter a night to calm him down.  He lies and listens.   Some days he is more interested than others.   We’ve done this he a little over a year old.   Currently we are on the sixteenth book in the series,  Kabumpo in Oz.  I wonder how far we will get before I either have to start over as he can pay more attention now or when he tells me he is done.   There are forty-two “canon” Oz books in total.

I’ve also been working on the New Jedi Order series that encompasses the Star Wars extended universe.  I used to buy all the Star Wars books as they came out.   Somewhere between 1997 and 1999 I stopped.   I just lost the interest for that time.   When I decided to get back into it I chose the NJO because it was one of the most highly acclaimed Star Wars series I missed.   I started these also in December and I’m on the eleventh book of the nineteen book series.   This is put on hold about two weeks ago  since Lex accidentally broke my Kindle case.  I don’t have a book light so I stopped reading these before bed.

I took a side track for a few days in January when I worked the first ninety-three issues of The Walking Dead.  The comic series blows away the television show.  The story is much more engaging.  It is also completely different in some ways.  The television show is like an echo of the comic.   It is not quite complete with a bitter hollowness that existed only in the original.

Last week I read through 11/22/63 which is Stephen King’s time travel novel.  I had not read any King with the exception of the Dark Tower series since Insomnia came out.   King is a great writer and storyteller.  I have never liked the fact that his book endings always seem rushed and hollow.   The journey through this book was fantastic, but the ending was logically rushed.   I’m not sure how I feel about the ending.   Under the Dome by King is one of the books I’m also working through.   We will se how that ends.

Yesterday  finished up Shadows in Flight.  It is the latest book in the Ender’s Game Universe.  It was a short read.  It took less than two hours without giving it undivided attention.   I love everything in the Enderverse, this one just felt a bit anti-climactic.  The ending also didn’t put me in a happy place.   This book was designed to set up another book coming out this summer.   I’m happy that I got something, but I’m not sure I got what I wanted from this book.

Currently in rotation of being read as the already mentioned Kabumpo in Oz, Under the Dome, and the Eleventh NJO book.   I’m also working through The Steve Jobs and Wicked (though Wicked has been in the works of being read before I started reading more in December).    I swear there is two to three more books I’ve read, but for some reason Goodreads is not displaying them properly.   It didn’t even display 11/22/63 until I hunted for it and confirmed I had marked it as read.  It just wasn’t displaying on my read list.  If I hadn’t just entered it last week it wouldn’t have been fresh in my mind that I put it in there.

What about you?  Have you been reading anything worthwhile?

The other day Xie was upset.   She wanted to go out and blast the world with what was going on.   She was either going to go to Facebook or her blog and just let it out.   I advised her not to.  This is not her story, but a view-point on why I suggested to wait a couple of days.

I’m all for writing on high emotions, but the story she wanted to tell would have been clouded by her anger and frustration.  For some stories the high emotion can work.   If the tale is about your feelings and what you are going through, writing during that time can be a great stress relief.   You are naïve though if you think that you are not being clouded a bit.   The story won’t be correct until you do it calmly.

Calm also has it problems depending on the subject.   It can make you seem distant.   It will be like you are not in touch with what happened.  I’ve written a bit with the calm abstraction of things that have happened to me in the past, about my mother, about my son.   It depends on the subject.

If you are writing about your own personal views, your moral outrage, or just strong emotions in general – the best time to put the words up are as you are going through them.   If you are telling a story that is bigger than those things, it’s best to get calm first you.   You then can remove the name calling.   The bickering with someone else can be a little abstracted.   It will make your writing more coherent without being an attack that you may regret later.

It is hard sometimes.  I’ve done my fair share of writing angry.   I have written depressed.   There are even times I write because it is the only thing I can control and it removes me from world for a brief instant.  I will also go through spurts where it is almost an addiction.  I enter the mindset that if I don’t get this story out now it will never get out.   We all ride an emotional roller coaster and use what ever means we can to cope with that.

There are some methods you should consider when writing something in a public forum.  You have to see how you are going to appear by sharing these emotions.   These status updates and stories are never going away.  Will you come off selfish?   Will you state something you don’t really mean because you are in the moment?   You have to live with these decisions.   You should always question if what you are writing is something you will forever be able to stand by.   You should not write it if you can’t.

If you can live with it, then emotion can be a powerful tool.   You can learn to avoid any topics that may cause you regret.   Once something becomes a trained response you know that you should not get into a high brow discussion about cousin Tommy’s AIDS condition (note that there is no cousin Tommy in my immediate or extended family, just an example.)  You can also go on the attack for things that you are passionate about and are at the core of being.

If you are not publishing these things online, write!  Write about your feelings.  Write about every little detail.  Keep a private journal that the world would despise you for if they ever saw it.   Then realize the world doesn’t really care – this moment and time is about you and what you are going through.   Once you decide to keep a moment private it’s your to exaggerate or exam as much as you want.

I guess this could be summed up – don’t publish online angry without and editor that can make sure you really want to do that.

I’m randomly listening to music and Sk8er Boi comes on.   I’ll admit it I like the song, until I listened too closely to the lyrics.   Once you listen to the  lyrics the  song falls apart.

The first verse sets up the standard Romeo and Juliet motif.   Something that always works.   The first time you listen through the song you think they are going to work out, because that’s the way it happens right?  The girl succumbs to peer pressure and doesn’t date her Romeo.

We fast forward five years in the second verse (so the girl is between 20 and 23).   The girl has a child and see the boy she didn’t date if now famous.   Her friends that bashed him in high school want to go with her to see the show.   The setup seems to state that her life is over or at least a dead-end.  That she will have a chance to get back together with her “true love”.

The third verse and the rest of the song switch perspectives.   They are from the girl who is currently dating the boy.  The fact that the first girl missed out because she didn’t stick with him.  That she is the lucky one because she is with the successful rock star.

WTF?

How many people do you know that starting dating in high school that are still together.   Maybe 1 -2 couples?  That somehow the first girls life would have been different if only she had gone on a date and resisted peer pressure.   That she wouldn’t have a child and her life would be going somewhere.   All they did is flirt and never dated.   If anyone I had ever flirted with, or dated, became famous I wouldn’t regret that I didn’t date them or stick with them.   I would know there is a reason I didn’t date them.

The fact that the second girl lords it over the first girl’s head in the song is also insane.   It shows that she is just petty and seems to be insecure about her relationship.  She is dating the boy more as a trophy than true love.   If it was true love on both sides, she wouldn’t worry about a girl her boyfriend never dated and hadn’t seen in years.

The song when you don’t pay attention is a happy bouncy pop song.  It seems to be about love, but you don’t care.  You just enjoy the beat.   The true meaning behind the song are regret, jealousy, and envy.  These aren’t things you would associate with the song on a casual listen.

Of course Avril Lavigne was a teenager when she recorded this song.   Her whole life was defined by her relationships around her.  She hadn’t had time to grow into her own person yet.   I wonder what she thinks looking back at that song now that she is approaching thirty.   Having a kid to her probably seemed like it would be the end of the world.  Her dreams would have been taken from her.

I’m sure a portion of this is I’m an adult and not a teenager.   Age gives me a different perspective.   This song is also a decade old and probably not influencing too many teenagers today.   What about the ones that were teenagers a decade ago.   The twenty something girls and boys that walk around today?  What did they take from this song?

This isn’t a song about being yourself.  This is not a song about acceptance.  It really is a song about pettiness.  I’ll still listen to it though….

Let me start that this was relayed to me.  Unfortunately I was not able to witness it first hand and Xie wishes she could have had it recorded.

Yesterday Lex was up early and recently we’ve got a new early morning routine of saying goodbye before I go to work.  In the past he was always still asleep when I left.   From his room he watched me take out the trash and leave for work.  He was waving and smiling the whole time.

I guess about a half hour later he goes running into the master bedroom.   He was saying “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy”.

Xie answered “What is it?”

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy – they took it!”

“They took what?”

“They took the trash”

“Ok”

“No, Mommy Mommy Mommy (he is very repetitive when excited and gathering his thoughts).  They took the trash.   Daddy took the trash outside and then they took it away.   We need to go get it.”

“They are supposed to take it”

“No, Daddy took the trash outside and left it by the street and they took it away.”

That’s the dialog that was told to me last night when I got home.  Xie then explained to Lex how the trash man comes and picks up the trash.  That the trash man did nothing wrong.   He then wanted to take more trash out so they would come back and he would get to see them again.

Maybe Xie will comment on here or Facebook on anything I got wrong.  While amusing at first, I’m sure part of his excitement and worry goes back to a week and a half ago when his stroller was stolen.    He understood then what it was like to lose something that wasn’t temporary like he would for a punishment.   When that happened he was more confused and didn’t understand.   I’m sure part of how he felt that he didn’t seem to express came out when he saw Daddy purposely set something on the street and someone else came and took it.

While it wasn’t a great thing to have the stroller stolen, it seems to have taught Lex the lesson of what it feels like to have it happen to him.   It will hopefully ingrain in him that he should never do it.   That kind of understanding and learning from the event might just have been worth getting the stroller stolen.

Now I’m just wondering where he thought the trash went all this time….

I managed to do more work importing Last.fm data.  Earlier I posted how nothing was working.  I mentioned how there is no method to do this.  I also mentioned how some of the migration methods available.  Well below are the instructions on how to actually accomplish this. Dealing with the methods listed online, these were the only steps I found to merge two or more last.fm accounts.

There is come caveats.   I was not able to get all of my tracks down from the server.   Most of this is because of bad metadata.  Out of the my 23k submitted tracks I only managed to get about 20k of them downloaded.   In the re-upload I lost another 6k.

The reason for the loss is two-fold.  I think the script has an issue with Kanji characters and skips them.   This removed a few video game sound tracks from my track count.   Other scripts I have found just died when they reached the bad metadata.   Since this is the most data I can get, it is better than nothing.

You will also lose the last play time. If this is important to you then I can’t help you. Last.fm will not accept tracks with a play date of older than fourteen days. The API does not have a way around that restriction that I have seen. I did find a post that mentioned someone created a script that would rescrobble all of your old music and submit it in a manner that new accounts are able to perform, but he never released public.

Let’s move to how to do this (as a side, I performed this on OSX – but this should easily work on Linux or Windows):

Requirements:

• A last.fm account
• Python installed
• Qtscrob
• A spreadsheet package
• A text editor

1.  Go and download the lastexport.py script from this page

2. Run the command “python ./lastexport.py –user USERNAME”  and replace USERNAME with your account (or any other account) you want to export.

3.  When the script completes it will create a file named exported_tracks.txt, rename the extension to .csv so you can easily open it your spreadsheet.   This file is tab-delimited.

4.  You should now have a spread sheet opened with all the data nicely arranged in columns.   The first column is the timestamp.   The second column is the track name. The third column is the artist name.  The fourth column is the album name.  The fifth column is the Musicbrainz artist ID.  The last Column is the Musicbrainz song ID.

You will now need to rearrange these columns to the following order:

 - artist name
 - album name (optional)
 - track name
 - track position on album (optional)
 - song duration in seconds
 - rating (L if listened at least 50% or S if skipped)
 - unix timestamp when song started playing
 - MusicBrainz Track ID (optional)

For the track position column I just auto-filled 1′s in all the cells down the sheet.  For the song duration column I filled in 180 (3 minutes) in all the cells down the sheet.   For the rating columns I filled in L in all the cells down the sheet.

The Unix timestamp is a tricky one.If any tracks on your list are older than fourteen days old you will need to change the time stamp or last.fm will ignore those submissions.

Previously I had a friend generate a list of Unix times 180 seconds apart.  I copied this in, but realized my 20k tracks took the time back older than fourteen days.   I took the latest 2k times and just copy and pasted those 10 times down the list.   To find the latest Unix time and understand the time stamps go to this site.

At this point you should have all the columns filled out in the correct order to create a .scrobbler.log file.   The website everyone points to for the .scrobbler.log file format details seems to be down when I was doing this.  Here is a link to the page in the Internet Archive.

I do have a theory with this method that all the tracks can have the same time stamp.   One of the earlier methods I tried did not allow that, so if you don’t want to figure out a bunch of random time stamps it is something you can test with. The difference in this article is how QTscrob is going to submit these tracks compared to how Libre.fm did in my other article.

5.  Select all the data in the spreadsheet and copy and past it straight into a text editor.   You are going to add the following lines to the very top of the new file you created:

 #AUDIOSCROBBLER/1.0
 #TZ/UTC
 #CLIENT/Rockbox h3xx 1.1

These lines are required for the file to be recognized as a .scrobbler.log file.

6. You can now save the file. You must choose a Unix format or a format that will add hard breaks at the end of each line. I believe this is what caused the file to fail on me earlier. If you editor allows it (mine did not) you can save the file name as .scrobbler.log (remember the “.” at the beginning of the file name.

7. If your text editor did not allow to save the file name as .scrobbler.log you must rename your file to this at the command line or terminal level.

8. Start up QTscrob and select open .scrobbler.log. Browse to the directory where the file is. It is only looking for the containing directory so you will not be opening the file name directly.

9. At this point (if you have done everything correctly and I’m not going to troubleshoot files if you did not) you should see a list of tracks in the QTscrob interface. If everything looks good just click submit.  This may take a few minutes depending on how many tracks you have.

In theory someone could easily change the lastexport.py script so that it directly creates the .scrobbler.log file.   If you are interested in doing this, you would have to change the field order, add the extra columns, and the header in the manner described in steps four and five.

At different points I have spent days trying to find a good way to do this.  With the bad metadata most archiving scripts just failed on me, so I’m quite happy with the lastexport.py script.

I couldn’t find a single place online that told you directly how to make a .scrobbler.log manually.   All the sites seemed to assumed that you must only be using software to do this and the programmers would only look at the file specifications.   I could not even find an example file to compare to.   If the Internet Archive had not mirrored the site with the file specifications I never would have gotten this far.

If this post has been useful to you, just please drop a note and let me know.

Thinking today I would do a post with a fewer words than normal. I started posting some bad cover songs on my Facebook timeline yesterday. Thought I would share with the rest of the world today and round out a complete list. The first one above is Miley Cyrus covering Smells Like Teen Spirit. I can say at least she tried to embrace the spirit of the song, yet still missed the mark. Cobain is rolling in his grave. Ironically I could not find one of her covering Achy Breaky Heart (I looked because I wanted to be amused).

Britney Spears singing I Love Rock and Roll? Why Joan? Why did you authorize this?

While not the most terrible thing on the planet, Avril Lavinge singing Imagine just doesn’t fit musically or personality type. From her faux teenage angst image it might though. She is just trying to show her sensitive side, which comes off hollow.

You would have almost thought this would have been too new to have a terrible cover already.

The Boys of Summer is just one of those great road songs. This version, not so much.

You take a song that is about teen angst and fighting back, and you then turn it into a dancing pop song? Can we have Hillary and Avril switch, at least this song would have made a bit more sense for Avril to sing.

Yes, your famous because of your father and a reality show. Yes, you adored Madonna growing up. No, you should not try to tribute one of her songs.

Madonna, please see the note I left Kelly Osborne.

As a huge Guns N’ Roses fan, this song torments me to no end. I think I even had a nightmare about it once.

I have no words.

Ok, this last one is awesome and horrendous at the same time.

I have to say as Lex grows up the music issue will probably get to me. Him thinking that my favorite bands are terrible. Of course I will think all his music is derivative or noise. It’s the generational chasm that all of us eventually cross however. This is going to be the worst when he is a teenager. More than likely he won’t have the wide range of music appreciation that he may gain later in life.

It was a bit different for me. My parents had me when they were young. My mother was mostly into eighties pop music. So the music we were listening to was Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, and Michael Jackson. My father loved the oldies station, he could go on about Steppenwolf, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Cream. None of his bands ever spoke to me. He didn’t like Culture Club because of Boy George’s orientation. He had a little of an issue with his seven-year old singing Karma Chameleon.

There was an overall fandom of Billy Joel in the house. The Stormfront Tour was my first concert. To this day I can still sit back and listen to almost Billy Joel album and enjoy it. There seems to be very few people who dislike him. Some people may not be into his music, but most don’t hate him.

Xie posted something about Pearl Jam last night. My sister responded that she gets made fun of for liking Pearl Jam. I don’t get that. I may not have liked the Rolling Stones so much, but I don’t know of anyone that would have been teased for liking them. This sister is twelve years younger than me. She once told me she discovered this awesome band called Guns and Roses…..smile and nod……

If we go two generations it gets even worse. How do you bridge the gap from The Andrews Sisters to Nirvana smoothly? How do you even justify that to a teenager? I don’t think today’s music is bad, but it doesn’t grab me. Most the stations still play the music from the nineties that I loved. I wonder if this equivalent of my father and his oldies station. When my father was my age, I was 15 – the start of my prime music listening years. There was a huge gap between what we would listen to, I can’t imagine what it will be like between Lex and I.

While Autumn and I have guilty pleasure pop songs we like, we aren’t really pop people.  The heavy pop we listen to is from the eighties.  The equivalent from a year perspective for my son would be my parents to be listening to pop music from the fifties.  I’m sure he will want to strangle us.   Michael Jackson to him will be equal to Buddy Holly for me.

I’ll just leave you with this item trying to bridge the generational gap:

A little over a year ago I was almost done with getting my mp3 metadata into shape.  I had a few stragglers but the majority was complete and I would get to it eventually.   Over the last year my collection has grown a lot.  That small part that was probably under 10% of the collection had ballooned to 25-30% with all the new items that I was too lazy to update.   For those curious I have a ton of classical and video game music.  The local library has also helped my collection grow.

Last night I finally sat down and fixed them.  I fixed them all.   I have 100% metadata done in my Itunes library.  All albums have an artist.  All albums have cover art.   Genres are consolidated down to about 15 different types.  Each artist only has a single listing (I’ve fixed typos and spelling differences). Albums with multiple CDs have now been consolidated under a single name instead of having album names ending in CD1 and CD2. It actually looks good.

I do have to admit that some of the albums I had no idea what the true genre is though.  So these items got lumped together under Rock or Pop depending on how I felt at that moment.   I don’t really use the genre tab too much, so it’s just a guideline anyways.  If anyone wants to spend hours sorting out proper genres they are more than welcome to.

This cleanliness does come at a price.   It took me about 6 hours going through and removing duplicate tracks, consolidating information, and downloading cover art and applying it.   It is not a job for the weak of heart to power through.   Watching Breaking Bad while I did this is probably the only reason I could maintain my sanity.  I still have to do with other digital media also.   It makes everything prettier and easier to find.  I just wish that it didn’t take so long.  Even with automation tools it takes tons of time.

After I got the metadata “masters” done on my desktop I deleted all the earlier non-perfectly cleaned tracks out of the file server.   I set the server then to reimport all the tracks again.  I was going to bed when I was done anyways so it didn’t affect me at all.

I thought briefly about re-importing them to the laptop.   The problem with this is that it will screw up all of my playlists.   I wish there was a good way to sync metadata updates between computers.   I do know the “hacks” using a central repository, but that doesn’t fix the problem of keeping an archive at home and having one to take with you at the same time.

Now if I could only fit all the music into a single Google Music account.   I’m going to start uploading tracks there soon.  The only reason I have not done that is the screwed up metadata.   I guess I don’t have much of an excuse now.

Onto to mixing the metadata on the DVD rips……